Delay of gratification, motivation for the prohibited gratification, and responses to temptation

Yielding to temptation, in a situation in which attainment of achievement rewards is contingent upon deviant (cheating) behavior, was conceptualized to be a function of (a) the strength of the motivation to attain the prohibited gratification, and (b) the inability to delay immediate gratification. 6th-grade boys participated in an experimentally controlled "shooting gallery" game of skill in which attainment of achievement rewards (prizes) was contingent upon the child's falsifying his own scores. Motivation for the prohibited gratification was inferred from "n Achievement" scores: preference for immediate, smaller (ImR) or delayed, larger (DelR) rewards in choice situations was the index of the ability to delay gratification. Achievement motivation was related to the S's producing sufficiently deviant scores to obtain an achievement reward, and preference for DelR was related negatively to the amount of cheating and positively to the latency of cheating, i.e., the number of trials before the occurrence of the 1st deviation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).